The examples in the article are rather cherry-picked. Failures in Vietnam can hardly be blamed on an IBM 360 only. The Hamas attack might have surprised Israel but the Iron Dome has been tech working well in recent years. The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that Russia was about to attack Ukraine. And it was a bunch of rather theoretical physicists who built the atomic bomb.
> The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that Russia was about to attack Ukraine
The fact that anyone needed a warning was ridiculous. It was plain as day that Russia was committed to entering the country either immediately before or immediately after the Olympic games.
You don't bother sending a large part of your navy all the way around Europe and into the Black Sea just for fun. And you definitely don't send supplies of blood to the staging area near your border if it's just a drill or a show of force.
Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other time". Meanwhile, it seemed inevitable to me once Putin started making ultimatums that would never be fulfilled and gave him no way to back down without a significant loss in reputation and standing.
Stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin%27s_December_20... which Putin doubled down on harder and harder until the invasion finally started. Couple that with all the reports of the military and supply build-up, I found it weird that everybody was so skeptical. It felt more likely to me every day that we got new information about what was happening to the point that I didn't see how it couldn't happen.
> Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other time".
Unless you're deep in policy circles and those people you talked to are some of the people who would be crafting a govt response to a Russian invasion, then that's not really what "anybody who would listen" refers to. It's not the internet hoi poloi that Biden was trying to convince, but anyone who could help stop it, or at least formulate govt reactions to it.
> Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other time".
The Russians had, and continue to have, a very strong presence in online communities aimed at shaping consensus, disrupting community, and obfuscating efforts. it is plainly active here on HN, on Reddit, and on Twitter -- often quite blatently. "hypernormialization" and all that. there was a concerted push prior to invasion across all platforms of "Russia would never do this".
China, NK, Iran, are also very active in this game, though often more focused on specific areas. India, Europe, and even Brazil have also dipped toes in aggressive online efforts, though mostly focused on very specific things, like stymming the flow of Indian ex-pats to Canada (and killing Canadian-Indian activists...), or consensus shaping around Brexit.
You mean this? Seems legit enough to me to consider a possibility. This just shows that you and others are unable to properly evaluate and analyze the news that you consume.
A CIA office jam packed with SIGINT capabilities and there's zero hard evidence of this microwave weapon. Just a bunch of anecdotal symptoms that sound like a hangover.
My evaluation and analysis capabilities don't include just believing whatever the CIA says.
I thought that Putin was bluffing, based on the low number of the soldiers around the borders alone. 200 000 simply aren't enough to take a country the size of Ukraine. During the wars of the 20th century, the Ukrainian theatre was regularly contested by millions of soldiers at the same time, and basic control of population still requires about 1 soldier to approx. 30 civilians or so, even if the only resistance is guerilla-like. It is much worse with the regular army fighting back.
As we saw, 200 000 definitely weren't enough to take Ukraine, but possibly Putin believed that the country was going to collapse immediately instead of fighting back.
The number of troops was absolutely low. My read at the time was that 100,000 troops (the early build-up) was concerning but could easily be a bluff or a test. The naval movement was the tip off to me, with the blood reserves setting a very short clock on how soon it would start.
I really think the Russians believed they either were going to be welcomed by many Ukrainians, or that a blitz for Kiev would be a quick 3-7 day affair. The downed planes of paratroopers in the first day or two, plus the convoy of trucks that only brought a few days of diesel seem to line up with the second scenario.
And yet, many people in Ukraine did not believe it until after the invasion began, because they had had numerous false alarms in the years after the Crimea seizure.
I can't speak to anyone in Ukraine as I don't know what was being reported there, but from the basic media reports I saw in western Europe it was clear.
Russia had built up a similar sized ground force in the border in past years, either as drills or threats. Those never included major naval movements though, and definitely didn't include blood supply on the front lines.
As soon as the blood showed up a week before the Olympics everyone should have known it was game on, even if naval actions alone could be written of as not a sure sign.
Well unfortunately that says something about the French intelligence.
I really don't mean this as a condescending arm chair quarterback statement. The intelligence agencies would clearly have access to much, much more information than a civilian. That said, I don't know who, with any level of military understanding, would expect medical facilities and large amounts of blood to be setup and delivered to the front line of fear mongering campaign.
Ukraine was quietly telling everyone to shut up because it was frantically trying to position troops and equipment. Had it been officially acknowledged these trips and equipment would have been trying to smash through an onslaught of refugees fleeing the east, thus helping Russia to face less pushback and effectively ceding the territory as Ukrainians fled and ethnic Russians stayed.
This seems 100% plausible, though its one I haven't seen anything necessarily to corroborate. It makes total sense though and would be a reason for silence.
Edit: rereading this theory, it does read pretty terribly for any civilians living there. Effectively, in that scenario the government decided to mislead the public in order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way rather than allow them to flee (and get in the way). This matches my cynical views of government, but if true it should still piss off a number of people that actually believe governments are there to serve us above all else.
Just to circle back, I'm pretty sure it was Oleksii Arestoyvich who said it. I can't find the video. I think I saw it on Good Times Bad Times youtube channel.
> government decided to mislead the public in order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way
It doesn't look so as Ukrainian government made a huge effort to evacuate the population from the war zone when the conflict started. It's just that they prioritized moving assets to the front (winning the war). Though I agree with you, governments doesn't serve the population but rather themselves.
That sounds about right. It wasn't a massive naval deployment that concerned me at the time, it was a naval movement at all in coordination of the troop deployment. Honestly, a huge naval movement would have looked more like sabre rattling as they really shouldn't have needed a massive naval force to do what they wanted to do (assuming that was a blitz on Kiev).
Anyway, I just happened to be right once among the countless times I have been wrong about similar situations. My main surprise is that anyone considered the idea of an invasion impossible once blood was being delivered to the line.
Organizations commonly fail by deluding themselves. One form of self-delusion is confusing motion for progress. The author's point is that the Pentagon thinks it is funding technology but isn't getting value for its money. It's failing to do so because it lacks the will or ability to unite expertise, authority, and responsibility in a single brain. When organizations diffuse responsibility or grant authority to people unequipped to distinguish motion from progress, the result is always waste and stagnation.
Effective leadership is a continual struggle against this entropic tendency of organizations towards management of appearances over world-of-atoms results. During those rare interludes in history when a strong leader manages to temporarily reverse this organizational entropy, magic happens. Consider ULA versus SpaceX or DeepMind vs. OpenAI
Imagine how much further up the technology ladder we as a species would be if institutional competence were the norm, not an unstable and fleeting miracle.
Lots of failures are just human and political. Sure technology can obscure the obvious or highlight the unlikely, but it's just not that commonly influential (at least not yet, the day will come).
The US even warned Russia of the attack in Moscow, but it was treated as political interference. That was almost certainly signals intelligence ignored.
The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was planning some attack on some large gathering, including concerts, in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned Americans to avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours. That was on March 7th. The actual attack would only take place on March 24th.
Incidentally, there is speculation that the attack may have been planned for March 9th. One of the terrorists was photographed at Crocus on the 7th, and on the 9th there was a large concert by Shaman - a patriotic Russian singer who's regularly made songs glorifying the war in Ukraine, performed for soldiers in Russia's claimed territories, and so on. This would also have coincided with just before the Russian elections, which happened on the 15th. But security was extremely high during that concert - very possibly in response to the US warning.
By contrast when Russia warned the US about the Boston Bomber, the warning was precise to the point of even naming him.
> The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was planning some attack on some large gathering, including concerts, in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned Americans to avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours.
That was the public "travel advisory" by the US department of state. We don't know what the CIA told their Russian counterparts according to their "duty to warn".
The media has swapped into repulsive but predictable propaganda mode over the attack. However, as a result, more facts are coming out. And those facts suggest that nothing significant was shared beyond the travel advisory. From a recent NYTimes article [1]:
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"Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., emphasized Tuesday in public comments that the information the United States provided was “of a general nature.” “We reacted to this information, of course, and took appropriate measures,” he said, noting that the actions the F.S.B. took to follow up on the tip didn’t confirm it.
The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow prevented U.S. officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary, out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources or methods.
In its March 7 public warning, the U.S. embassy said the risk of a concert venue attack in Moscow was acute for the next 48 hours. U.S. officials say it’s possible Russian authorities pushed hard around the 48-hour warning period but later grew more relaxed and distrustful when an attack didn’t occur."
It is unclear whether U.S. intelligence mistook the timing of the attack or the extremists delayed their plan upon seeing heightened security.
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It's amusing contrasting the very few facts the article provides, buried deep within it, with the framing, implications, and non sequiturs scattered through the first 60% of the article. Irrefutable and undeniable [2], all over again.
Any non-state entity exists at the blessing of one or more state entities with power, money, and help.
The "fact" that this question is never asked by "news" organs is very telling. It is a very hot topic on the other side of the geopolitical fence, this patron of ISIS ..
Why, we can all count fingers on one hand, can't we? We know whose proxy they ain't and after that it is process of what is not eliminated. Some say they are the original counter-counter-proxy (cause the others also liked the idea of this genre and made counter-proxies) and with the first proxies (in that genre) being the Mujahidin in Afghanistan hitting USSR troops, unless you want to go all the way back to Lawrence of Arabia and Ottomans ..
p.s. part of the deal Nixon made with Mao was that CPC would no longer support various cells in the 'Global Energy Zone' since they were now "partners" in the Global Economy. Overnight thousands of Maoist flowers all over campuses and in middle east went away. All these groups existentially require a powerful patron or two. So ISIS has a mommy and a daddy and it aint Russia and it aint Iran and China has been out of that game since 70s as a matter of historic fact. That leave US, UK ("the Empire"), the Europeans (French? Doubtful), and Israel, KSA, Qatar and UAE. Qatar is Muslim Brotherhood [& so is Turkey] so that seems to eliminate it [them]. That basically leaves Western and Abrahamic patriarch wanna-bes at the table of candidates.
> The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that Russia was about to attack Ukraine.
I had a Ukrainian model over February 21st, 2022 and I had mentioned it, she was very dismissive about the idea of invasion, and I gave a quizzical look because I wasn't sure if this was a coping mechanism, a real belief, her playing devil's advocate, or just a cultural way of responding - you know how some cultures or individuals have toxic positivity like ingrained in all their responses.
To me, it was obvious, like short position, prediction-market level of obvious. 0 days to expiration options contracts obvious. I saw the buildup on the border, the chatter, what Biden was saying, how Republicans politicized it based on nothing.
But I still think about her reaction, like in the future how I would respond. It seems pointless to have a differing worldview than people, and that leaves me with either complete inaction or just financial bets. I like "betting on my beliefs" as that's rewarded decently, and I'm fine with things not panning out like I predicted.
Just seems more natural to have discussions and seek a shared understanding of reality. But that seems pointless nowadays.
